Bugatti CEO Wanted To Drive The Thief Home After Chasing His Stolen Chiron To Austria In A 911
Most people would want the man who stole their multimillion-dollar hypercar locked up, but Bugatti CEO Mate Rimac wanted to drive him home. Rimac’s personal Chiron was taken from outside his company’s campus near Zagreb, Croatia, with the key still inside.
He jumped into his Porsche 911 and chased it across Slovenia until police finally stopped it in Austria. Mate Rimac has since shared the whole story in a six-minute Instagram video, and he sounds far less rattled by it than you might expect. We feel like we got the real GTA before GTA 6 drops in November 2026, but we digress.
How Mate Rimac Tracked And Chased His Stolen Chiron Into Austria
Rimac admits he has left the keys in his cars for years, including the Chiron and the Rimac Nevera, because Croatia has always felt safe enough. Staff often need to move the car or test something, so the key stayed inside while it sat in an unfenced lot at the factory. That habit caught up with him when a local man who came in looking for a job drove off in the Chiron instead.
An employee spotted the car leaving, and Rimac called the police right away. His team then pulled up the Chiron’s live telemetry, tracking its location, speed and fuel level as it headed for Slovenia with a one-hour head start. One of the police officers even joined the team’s group chat to get constant location updates.
Rimac grabbed his 911, which he says was “full of fuel,” and went full throttle after the Chiron, one of the fastest cars on the planet. The thief made it into Austria, where Rimac believes he half-filled the tank and left a gas station without paying.
Austrian police eventually stopped the Chiron near Graz on the A9 motorway. Rimac expected a quick handover at the roadside but instead counted about 10 police cars and 20 officers at the scene.
The Bugatti Boss And His Personal Chiron
Rimac founded Rimac Automobili in 2009 and now runs Bugatti Rimac, the company formed in 2021 as a joint venture with Porsche. He’s known for actually driving his hypercars, and so many colleagues borrow his Chiron (for development purposes) that he rarely knows where it is on a given day.
His Chiron Sport is one of 500 Chirons built before production ended in 2024, and it’s worth roughly $3.4 million. Its quad-turbocharged 8.0-liter W16 makes 1,479 hp and 1,180 lb-ft of torque, with top speed electronically limited to 261 mph.
The car came back with minor damage to its front bumper. Rimac says it can be repaired, and he doesn’t seem worried about it.
Mate Won’t Be Pressing Charges
After the arrest, Rimac asked to meet the man who stole his 250 mph hypercar. He found a distressed 36-year-old with a difficult past and felt sorry for him rather than angry. Rimac had even hoped to collect the Chiron and drive him back home to his family.
Rimac won’t press charges, but the thief is still in serious trouble because of how much the Chiron is worth. Graz prosecutors have reportedly already reported him, so the decision is out of Rimac’s hands.
The keys-in-the-car days are over at the factory, and Rimac has a warning for anyone thinking of trying it again. “Don’t try it; we have all the data, and you can’t do anything with the car without us,” he said.
When an Instagram commenter praised how calm he stayed through it all, Rimac replied, “I am used to much larger disasters. This one was Level 3 of stress on a scale of 10.”
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